The American poet Robert White Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts in 1926, and attended Harvard before receiving his B.A. from Black Mountain College in 1955. He went on to receive his M.A. from the University of New Mexico in 1960. Creeley began teaching at Albuquerque Academy in the late 1950s, and in 1967 joined the English faculty at the University of Buffalo. He stayed there until 2003, when he took a post at Brown University.

Creeley edited The Black Mountain Review (1954-1957), and developed a lasting relationship with Charles Olson, as well as other major poets of his generation. Creeley and Olson's complete correspondence fills ten volumes published by Black Sparrow Press. Creeley is primarily known as a poet, publishing thirty volumes of verse since 1952. His Collected Poems (1982, 2006) are published in two volumes by the University of California Press. His Collected Prose (2001) is published by Dalkey Archive Press.

Creeley married three times, first to Ann MacKinnon, with whom he had four children (one dying at birth). He met his second wife, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, while teaching in New Mexico. They had three daughters together. After twenty years they divorced, in 1976, the same year Creeley met his third wife, Penelope Highton, while travelling in New Zealand. They had two children together. Creeley died in 2005 in Odessa, Texas, of complications resulting from lung disease.